How to Drive BrandGen with a B2B Podcast

Ryan: Hello everybody. We're all coming from backstage virtually right now, so welcome. Settle in. Give people a few minutes to get in here. There we are. Hi Lindsay.

Lindsay: Hello.

Ryan: Hi Ian

Ian: Hey, everyone.

Ryan: Just told the group we'll give everyone a minute I assume to get some people in here, get comfortable.

Ian: Quite comfortable.

Ryan: Well, did I just share the chat?

Lindsay: No, inaudible I'm sharing the screen. At least I tried to share the PD Pdf, so let's try this again. Is it going to work? It's thinking really hard about sharing the screen. Did it stop trying? Oh, I need permission to share my screen. Maybe Nick behind the curtain can help me have permission to share my screen.

Ian: There's a song once called Behind These Hazel Eyes, similar to Behind the Scenes.

Lindsay: I'm aware of this song.

Ryan: I did this thing that -`

Ian: That would be the Kelly Clarkson phase.

Lindsay: I was going to say. There it is! Look at us! Hooray!

Ryan: inaudible I used to steal, this was when iPods were first a thing, so I used to just plug people's iPods into my computer and rip them. So I'll hit shuffle on my songs in my library today and Kelly Clarkson's Behind Hazel Eyes will just come on even though I didn't know I had that song. It happened to be literally two days ago.

Lindsay: We should have had that as our entrance music for this event.

Ryan: Does anyone here have hazel eyes?

Lindsay: I kind of do, but what is hazel anyway? It's like a fake color that nobody can agree on what it actually is. Okay, that said, we're at 1: 03. When should we get rolling? What do you think?

Ian: I think we could get started.

Lindsay: Okay. I think so too. Let's do it. All right. Hello everyone. I'm Lindsay Tjepkema. I am CEO and Co- founder of Casted. I am here with two of my friends in B2B marketing and B2B podcasting and B2B shows and all the things we're going to talk about today. Ryan and Ian, do you want to say a few words about yourselves? Ryan, why don't you go first just because you're next on my screen.

Ryan: Yeah. Hello everybody. I am the Chief Solution Officer at DemandJump. I wrote a book called Pillar- Based Marketing, and I've been spending the last two years of my life trying to convince the marketing world that there is a better, more data- driven way to handle organic content creation with a lot better SEO results than anyone in the industry is used to seeing. So I've just been doing a lot of talking to people about how all the things they're doing probably aren't doing very well for them and trying to show them a better way. But I come from marketing, I owned an agency for about 10 years before selling it to DemandJump and coming here, so I'm excited to be with my friends here.

Lindsay: Lovely. How about you Ian?

Ian: And I should add too that, Caspian not only do I have the book Pillar- Based Marketing, but it's a great read and sitting on my bookshelf over there, and that we use Pillar- Based Marketing at Caspian for our SEO content. So we love us some DemandJump.

Ryan: I wish I had a copy of it sitting near me so I could show how-

Lindsay: inaudible Ryan,

Ryan: ...you gave a blurb inside of it Ian. So Ian is completely biased here. Don't trust him

Ian: Exactly.

Lindsay: I even have a signed copy. That's how special we all are here. Okay, well thank you for being here. I'm excited to dig in.

Ryan: Wait, we didn't hear about Ian. Who's Ian? I don't know who this guy is.

Lindsay: Oh yeah, he just talked about how much he loves you. I thought that was it. That was inaudible.

Ian: It's the only thing that people really care about is my wife or Ryan. Yeah, so I'm Ian. I'm the CEO of Caspian Studios, and we make B2B video podcasts. And so we're a podcast as a service company. So we make everything from interview style shows, blended narratives, narrative fiction, all sorts of stuff. And I just wrote a book called The Serialized Content Framework, and that's what we're going to be talking about a lot today of how to drive brand gen with a B2B podcast and how all this content stuff, I think if you take my book and Ryan's book and put them together then I think you have a really modern, sharp, content strategy that can't be beat.

Lindsay: Indeed. And more to come about amplified marketing too. So all of us are here together for lots of reasons. One, we like to nerd out about this stuff together anyway, and we were like, Hey, why not invite all of you in to be a part of our nerdery, but also because this specific trio, we work together on a couple of things, but especially one show and it happens to be Ryan's show over at DemandJump called Page One or Bust, which you're going to hear about along with several other things today. But Ryan, will you tell us a little bit about the show? Give us some context about what it's all about before we dig in?

Ryan: Yeah, so Page One or Bust, that's a sort of road trip riff, but the idea is that we wanted to talk to as many marketing and business leaders because everybody deals with SEO in some way or another at this point, and just learn about their unique perspectives, where they come from, what their philosophies are in marketing, and what role SEO plays in that. And it's been a fun show. We've been going for two seasons now, I think over 40 episodes and just very typical interview format with myself. At first it was my co- author and the co- founder of DemandJump, Toph Day, and then our CMO Drew Detzler picked up for him when he left to pursue his dream job and we're all happy for him. And there's a lot of, I don't want to say a lot, there is some of our own editorial voice in there where we're trying to talk to our audience about pillar- based marketing less that we're trying to educate the people we're bringing on. We really try to make it as much as we can about them, and we're very irreverent and we have fun. Most of that is because I personally, and this is not a slight on any other presenters on this call because they're great at what they do, but I've seen so many podcasts where it's just like, well, we better do a podcast. And then you just, it's just your typical stuff where people say the same tired things that we've all heard a thousand times and then congratulate each other for doing it. And we knew we didn't want to do that. I would rather be self disparaging and just see what I can learn from as many people as possible. So it's been a good show and it's really expanded is potential for us far beyond what we originally thought it was going to be because of two things. One, we tapped Caspian Studios to produce it, and the production values, the quality are just incredible. The show itself, the product itself is super, super top class. But then everything else that you don't think about. All of the production that happens behind the scenes of getting guests and making sure these people aren't going to be crazy or waste our time, getting good conversations going, making them feel comfortable, all of that stuff, it goes a really long way. So we love our producers, Taylor and Shannon over there. They're just amazing people. And then Casted is the last bit of that equation where now we have this pretty substantial library after a couple of years of doing this show of just great conversations about a ton of different topics with a lot of really great influential people. And we can use Casted to sort of tap into that. And as we're doing our pillar- based marketing thing, developing organic content that aligns to the market, we can stop at every turn and say, what do we got in our audio library? What can we take from the podcast and just easily atomize and put out there. And so all of that goes together to something that between the three of us here and whoever else is watching, I honestly don't think about that often, which is amazing. We do this show, we put it out there, and then someone's like, " Hey, I listened to all the episodes of your podcast. It's really great." And then I'm like, " Oh, right, we have a podcast," just because it's so I show up, I talk, and then it happens. And it's been amazing.

Lindsay: Awesome. Well, thanks for the context. That's why we're all here is we're doing lots of things together, but one of which is that show, and we're going to dig into some of the things behind that. And honestly, Ian's going to be talking through a lot of this. Ian, you and your team produce. I can't say it enough, such exceptionally high quality shows. And we're going to really see behind the scenes about, okay, one of the things that I love about what you do is it's about creativity and it's about really pushing the limits on what I think a lot of people wrongly assume about what B2B marketing should be and what B2B content and B2B storytelling should be. You prove that it can and should be really creative, but it should also drive results. And so without further ado, let's get into it. I'm going to be driving, Ian's going to be talking and you better believe Ryan and I are not going to be able to help ourselves from chiming in and asking questions and making comments. So let's go.

Ian: Yeah. So we're going to get really into this concept of brand gen and you can hit our next slide here, but I think it starts one level behind that. So when I was thinking about this over the last seven years, that what kept coming up is that serialized content is eating the world. So I took this idea from Mark Andreessen's Software's Eating the World, and the more and more that I looked at it and that our team looked at it, that binge- worthy content is what people like. People like series and B2B historically is not really doing that. Go to the next slide. Everyone is obsessed with series. This is what we love. We love to binge Only Murders in the Building, we love Serial, we love Silicon Valley. It's like all these types of shows. We all love series and this is the stuff that as consumers, we really enjoy when the new episodes comes out and we can binge it and we can do that stuff. But historically, again, B2B is not really creating series in that sort of way.

Ryan: I'm sure we'll inaudible. Oh yeah, me too. I am going to not talk about this because I'll get on it for too long.

Lindsay: We're going to go on a very random, very different metaverse, different timeline conversation.

Ryan: But Ian, do you consider our show, I know that we're going to get into it more, but do you consider our show to be like a serial thing? I mean, there's episodes, but is that what you're talking about, something that's more of that like, oh, we have a new guest and we're talking to them every week, or is it something different?

Ian: Yeah, so in all of these, the Disney example, these are all series where you wouldn't really watch episode five, you'd watch episode two and then three and then four, et cetera. Whereas podcasts technically are actually episodic. But the reason why I call it serialized content is because it builds on itself. And if you start listening to a show episode five, and then you don't listen to Page One or Bust for the next 20 episodes and then you pick back up with it, you have a relationship with the host, you have a relationship with the content, you have a relationship with the segments, and it's something that you're building over time and you're putting in part of your routine and you can go back and binge stuff. And technically they are like one- off, but it is a series. And the difference between a series and one- off stuff is that if you were to just say like, " Hey, we're going to do a bunch of webinars or we're going to talk about the exact same thing that you talk about in the show," there wouldn't really be a connective tissue. Whereas what's so cool about building a series is that the listener can pattern match from one episode to another using segments and things like that. So for example, the show that I do Pipeline Visionaries where we ask all of the CMIs their uncuttable budget items. What's super helpful to be able to listen to 10 different CMOs' uncuttable budget items because you can look at all that stuff, but then you can look at all of them holistically and be like, okay, well what are the top ones from a bunch of them versus, oh, this company is similar to me. So it is building a series and you're thinking about your content as each one builds on itself rather than trying to drop one- off stuff. So it's super important to build a series. That's how you subscribe to it. You can listen in an app, you can download it, you can watch on YouTube, you can do all these different things and building series it's just way easier to understand. And this is what Hollywood realized. They're like, why would I keep doing one- off movies when I can make a bunch of TV shows that you can get on an app that build on each other and it increases the richness for the listener over time when it's serialized versus just dropping one- off stuff.

Lindsay: And the relationship and the trust. I mean, you both know me, I babble about human connection all day long. And if you want to build more loyalty, if you want to build trust, if you want to actually build a relationship with your audience, I think that's a really good way to do it. It keeps them coming back and it builds rapport and that really intimate human to human relationship.

Ian: Yeah, 100%. And it's something that they can always check in on, and they know that it's there, and they know that new episodes of DemandJump's podcast, Page One or Bust are always going to be there. And that is really nice to know. I love listening to the show. Do I listen to it every new episode when it comes out? No, but I go back and I go and I look at the feed and I pick the stuff that I want to do. And because I have a relationship with the ideas, with your process, it's a lot easier to do that.

Ryan: I've never listened to the show, so you're beating me.

Ian: You're in it.

Ryan: That's not a joke.

Ian: Oh, I know. The best is when you fall asleep and with your Airpods on, then all of a sudden you hear yourself talking in your own ear and you're like, what is happening? So connecting back to business, how do you engage prospects that are not ready to buy? This is the multi- billion dollar question that we're all trying to figure out. And you can go to the next slide here. So basically buyer behavior has changed, cookie list is coming prospects-

Lindsay: It's like the understatement of the year that buyer behavior has changed. All of us BD marketers are like, yeah, no kidding. Everything about it has changed, right?

Ian: Yeah. And just how people buy. They're just like, I'm going to do a lot of this stuff on my own and then I'm going to engage sales when I'm ready to really talk about it. And so the question that we're all asking ourselves is the 95% of time that they're not in a buying cycle, how are you engaging them? And this is what we've seen over and over and over again with all of the series that we've done is that if you're talking to someone in March and they're not going to buy until at the earliest November and all of you're doing is creating just buyer type content, then you're not going to have anything for them. And by the time they get to November, your competitor who has been creating, who has a podcast, who's had them on there, who's had them to their event series, who's done this stuff, that they're going to have a much better relationship with that person.

Ryan: This is true for every kind of content. You look across the spectrum, even SEO, you've got people trying to drive traffic to their website and they're cherry- picking, here's a term that indicates this person wants to buy my product rather than, here are the things that I need to cover to become an authority on this topic so that I'm someone that's consulted regularly when somebody's trying to learn about this. It's like I know that the funnel is something that we're not going to be able to get away from that concept, but I literally preach at conferences all the time that the funnel is dead, the linear buying motion that you can sort of tack onto a timeline and expect it to go through when you plan on it, it's just not how people work. We all just sort of go on our own journeys and find our way where we want to go, and we expect to be able to serve ourselves along the way.

Ian: And we're looking for stuff throughout the year, and we're looking for basically how to get better at our jobs all the time, not just when you're in a sales cycle, which is I think a huge issue. And so obviously they see content in communities. So this is like, you've all probably heard of dark social and that whole thing, and people are in WhatsApp groups and Discord and all that other stuff. So they're going and seeking their peers in communities to learn better, and then they're seeking content to build a relationship with that. And so you need to be thinking about those two things. And just historically, people just really aren't thinking about that stuff. We will get into the SEO piece of this, but again, a lot of people are making that type of content just purely demand focused content like buying focused content, not relationship driven, community driven, I'm just trying to be helpful content.

Lindsay: And I'm curious from everybody listening or watching and both of you, Ryan and Ian, I feel like it's now more than ever, at least more now than in a very, very long time, because there's so much fear and there's so much pressure to move everything to demand gen. Everything has got to be ROI, results driven, data driven. Can we measure it? Can we show results? And yes, I mean, speaking from the CEO seat, I know we're all not only creating content, but leading businesses, that's important. You've got to do more with less. You've got to be able to show results. However, you can't move it all over there and you cannot neglect the content for community's sake and for relationship building because we're all people. We know that that's how we consume content. You build relationships with the brands that you eventually end up doing business with. And if we neglect that, we're going to see all of these pipelines that we're trying to build through just straight only demand gen efforts really start to dry up.

Ryan: I think the technology and the data itself lead us into this vicious cycle where marketers first got into this really objective, we need to pick apart every little bit of information we can about our activity through paid advertising first. That was the first sort of realm where I can log into Facebook and I can build an ad and I can get all of this data around what I'm doing. And put yourself in a marketer's shoes, going to a boardroom and saying, okay, here's everything I can tell you about this one tactic. And then here's all this other amazing stuff we're doing. The attention goes to where the numbers are. And so I think that's one of the problems we're dealing with as an industry right now is waiting for the technology to catch up to the other parts of the marketing flywheel, I guess, so that we can begin speaking more intelligently about brand efforts, for example. Because I think that's been really hard to do to this point.

Lindsay: Yeah. And I mean, shameless plug, that's part of why we exist at Casted is to be able to connect the dots between creativity and business impact.

Ryan: Yeah, I was definitely setting you up for that.

Ian: Yeah, I was just going to use an example. So we use Casted for our shows, and so I'll give you a pretty good example of someone who hits me up out of nowhere, they're working at this company and they're like, " Hey, I just want to let you know, I think you should talk to someone on our team about building a podcast. I think we should use it." And I was like, " Oh, it's funny." And I went back and I looked, I'm like, this person has never listened to any of our podcasts. That's crazy. And she responded. She's like, " Oh, no, I listened to every episode." She'd recently just changed companies and so at the new company, she was like, yeah, my old company, which you could go on a Casted and see that in her old company was listening to the show, but in her new company, she couldn't get it done in her old company, but in her new company she made the intro and now they're a customer of ours, and she's just like, " Hey, I just want to let you know that I love it." And also she was like, " I would never know what qualified is if it wasn't for listening to Pipeline Visionaries," which is the-

Lindsay: Another great company.

Ian: ...sponsor of that show. And that's the sort of thing where it's like... And I was just so happy that she listens to the show and finds it helpful. And that is what it's all about, is it's building this connection that is years in the making sometimes, that is what actual marketing is, and that's what sales is. That it's like in that moment when they're finally ready to buy that you can capture the value there. And that's so important. But most of the time, to this slide, it's like we're just making stuff that's not good and we get jealous of all the beautiful videos that inaudible does, and we get jealous of all this stuff, and it's like we're just making stuff that people don't really want, or we're making a 50th 90- page ebook or something, I just wrote a inaudible. But that's the thing is that's not relationship driven. You can't build anything with that. And we want to make cool stuff. B2B marketers are incredibly creative, and we look at our peers and we're like, they're making cool stuff, but we feel like we're hamstrung.

Lindsay: Yes. And that's one of the things that, Ian, you and I connected on, I don't know, however long ago. It was something I talked about, the Netflixization of marketing, and you talk and actually do a lot of this work about making B2B more creative, which is the bar has gotten so high on everything from TikTok to Netflix to it just seems like everywhere you turn, there's really high quality content. The bar, our expectations as humans, are so high for anything that we're going to consume. And it used to be, well, oh B2B, it's different for some reason. And that's not the case anymore. B2B can and should be really creative, really engaging, engaging with people on a human to human level, entertaining and educating just like B2C, just like entertainment, which I bet is something that we're going to talk about here very quickly.

Ryan: Last word on this, something that I've always believed in that this year at the Marketing Profs B2B forum, Anne Handley hero of mine.

Lindsay: I love her.

Ryan: Yeah, she's amazing. She spent majority of her time on stage during the keynote encouraging B2B marketers to just be weird, embrace it, embrace your unique perspective. And I think that's so important right now.

Ian: And so the antidote to the chaos is this concept of riches in niches. And this is something that people just are used to doing things the opposite way. They're used to creating the big giant thing like brand initiative and then having it trickle down. And it's the polar opposite is how you should be building these things, which is you should find the smallest viable audience, niche down as far as you can get and make a show that's super impactful for them. You go, sorry.

Lindsay: Which is scary. And I'm wondering too, as you're working with audiences, well, this explains why, but a lot of B2B marketers, especially now with all of the pressure, more now than ever, it's like, what do you mean a smaller audience? So tell us more, Ian.

Ian: Yeah, so I like this transparent person jumping on these people because-

Lindsay: I'm not going to do a sound effect.

Ian: ...if you think of the little red- haired kid with the goggles that when you're at the pool and this kid is just getting out and jumping in over and over and over and over again next to you, inaudible I'm sure they are. My son's just sitting on the edge, just looking at all the other kids playing. But when you go home, you will remember that little red haired kid in the goggles. If that kid was jumping on the other side of the pool, nowhere near you, you would never remember that kid. And if you look at the most popular creators right now on LinkedIn or the most popular business people, they hit you over and over and over and over again with their content that is really, really aligned to what you're trying to do. And what they're not doing is what I hear all the time when people are like, " Hey, we want to make a podcast. We want to make a future of work podcast." I'm like, " Who's it for?" CMOs and CIOs and CFOs, because that's all the people we're selling to. And I'm like, " Do you know that there's probably 50 future of work podcasts out there right now?" They're like, " No." I'm like, " Does anyone listen to those?" They're like, "I don't know." I'm like, " Do you listen to those? You're saying that you want to make this show." They're like, " No." And I'm like, " Do you think that marketers and IT people and finance people consume the same information?" It's like, no. What they probably do consume the same of as they all watch Marvel movies or Pride and Prejudice or whatever it is that their favorite content is, but they're not going to all consume your magical show that's going to put everything together. And I think that if you niche down and create something that's super valuable for that director level of IT that's... We're just trying to get directors to VPs. That's what this show is all about. That can actually have a huge impact.

Lindsay: And that is so important, and I want to dwell on this for a minute, is I had a customer, and I got probably a little too excited on the call when she told me this, but we were going through Casted Insights, which tells you what brands are listening. And I was like, " Yeah, your audience has been growing. This is great." And she was like, " Yeah, it's growing, but actually we're resetting because when we got into Casted Insights, we looked and we saw that we weren't reaching the right people, we were going too broad. And yes, the audience was growing, but it was getting really diluted and we weren't reaching the right people." So they're in the midst right now of trying to bring it back down so that they can get more niche. And it's so important to have that mindset and then also to be able to say, are we doing it? And do we know that we are? How do we know that we're big splash small pool?

Ryan: Especially in B2B industries and those verticals being one of us is so important for your credibility from the start. And the more niche you get, the more specific you get with your tribal language and the broader you get, the more watered down. And I think that's really, really important

Lindsay: For sure, which is why number of downloads that so many people have, that's the only metric you've had for so long is so dangerous because then the only measuring stick you have is just more downloads, more clicks, more listens, more watches. You've got to know who. Are we reaching the right people? Whether it's 10, a hundred, a thousand or a million, are they the right people?

Ryan: Yeah.

Ian: And so again, the antidote to this is edutainment. So if you were to look at grading your content on one to 10 scale of entertaining and one to 10 scale of educational, where do you think most of it would fall? And most people are making bottom left quadrant content if we're going to be fully honest. The best folks are probably making top left quadrant content where it's extremely helpful and educational. And then a few folks out there are starting to build these portfolios of serialized content, which we'll get into later, of things that are really educational and entertaining and all that stuff. Now, there's webinars that can be super entertaining, hopefully this one is, there's events that can be incredibly entertaining and educational. If you look at historically Dreamforce as a perfect example of that. A, that's a series, it's a series that they do every year. It's a franchise that they've built. They have a rock concert and all this educational stuff. That's great example of edutainment. And surprise, surprise, it's been one of the blueprints and most successful marketing campaigns of all time. So you just need to figure out how to create things that are edutainment and figure out where you're going. If anything does not score a combined score where it's over that threshold in the other quadrants, then just don't make it. Just make something else.

Ryan: Hey, Ian, we got a question about where community fits on that?

Ian: We'll get into community later, but community is layered on top of this entire thing and we'll talk about it basically a little bit later. But content and community are linked that it's a push- pull relationship where your content is supposed to push your community to have them think about things to co- create with your community and your community is then supposed to react and have a relationship back and forth there where you're creating conversation, you're spurring conversation, you're creating things that are remarkable that get people talking, and then they talk about those things with each other. And yeah, go ahead.

Lindsay: No, go.

Ian: Yeah, and it's super important to understand that content and community are super related, but they're not the same thing. Your podcast community for example, is not your entire community. Your customer community is different. Your podcast community is different. They're all part of what I call your total addressable community. And then there's sub communities within that. And that's another, again, riches and niches.

Lindsay: And I would say too is you can have a very uneducational, unentertaining community and same for content, or you can have really entertaining very educational content and community as well. And so I agree. I agree. All right, let's go on to the next.

Ian: So what is serialized content? So what I think this is it's one of these four things. It's a podcast, it's a video series, it's a written series or an event series, but it's something that is branded. It has a name. Page One or Bust. So if Ryan wanted to do a Page One or Bust private dinner with just guests who had been on the show, and we have chocolates and wine and beers. It's branded as such. It's a podcast, it's a video series, there's written content there, but it is serialized. It has a brand, it has a community that you're building towards, it has an audience. That is a series that someone can subscribe to that can be part of the stuff that they're building.

Lindsay: Agreed.

Ian: And then, so here's some examples. Remarkable is a Caspian show where we blend Hollywood stuff with B2B marketing, that's just for content marketers. This next one Dev Morning Show is a late night talk show that we made in partnership with LaunchDarkly starring, Cassidy Williams, who's amazing. And it feels like a late night talk show. It's really fun and silly and awesome, but it's purely a video first series. And then the Pipeline Summit from Qualified is an example of an event series. It's called the Pipeline Summit. It's very branded. Lindsay and I went to it this year.

Lindsay: It was so good.

Ian: Yeah, so good. And it's very much about that stuff. And they do virtual events. They do one a quarter for the Pipeline Summit, and then they do an in- person at Salesforce. But again, very branded, you know exactly what you're going to get. There's a quality standard and all that stuff. So I think that there's five pillars to a B2B series that are really important. So it has to be peer led. So it can't just be like you creating stuff and putting it out there. I think it needs to have you engaging with people from the community to get their insights. So for example, Ryan brings on other really sharp marketers and content marketers and SEOs onto his show to get their insights. And I think that's a critical component to a B2B series. It can't just be you putting your stuff out there. Of course you can, but it works better if it's pure.

Lindsay: It's more of the exception, not the best practice.

Ian: Yeah, exactly. Whereas that's very different from a really popular show like SmartLess, for example. SmartLess is not pure led. It's a comedy show. It's a very different utility. Again, you don't have to, but it makes everything work better and we'll get into that later. It's got to be edutainment, which you got to try to make it fun and funny and interesting and educational in some way. There needs to be some amount of levity otherwise it's just going to be boring. It needs to be multichannel, multi format, so Spotify, YouTube, Apple, potentially TikTok, sharing on LinkedIn, sharing that stuff, it's got to be-

Lindsay: You've got to amplify it.

Ian: Yeah, exactly. It's got to be amplified marketing and you can go to Casted US and go check out about amplified marketing.

Lindsay: Thanks, Ian.

Ian: But it has to be, and it's got to be on your website and all those different places. It's got to be persona driven. So it's got to be hyper- focused on a particular persona. I cannot tell you how many podcasts that we've created that people are like, " Man, it's crazy that you could get to an audience really quickly like that." And you're like, " Because it's for one person and one person only, and everybody who clicks on the links or on the ads that we're running are only that persona and everybody who's not going to click on that type of show." So it's got to be hyper niche on the persona, and then it's got to be serialized. It's got to be a show that has a consistent repeatable format that is a promise to the listener that you can deliver on. And underlying all of this is a tool like Casted or a technology where you can figure out who the heck is listening to this stuff. That's the inaudible to your question there of like, " Hey, I have some crazy ideas, but people could get fired for crazy ideas." Not if it drives pipeline, not if you can connect it to business value. And that's where these five fingers turn into the fist, and I don't know who we're punching in this scenario inaudible.

Lindsay: Hey, wow, that's scary.

Ian: If you do all of these and it has a technological layer underneath to figure out who is listening to all of this, you will win, I promise.

Ryan: Yeah, I mean, I've been encouraging marketers that I speak with for a long time to ask forgiveness, not permission. And you usually don't even have to do that if what you do results in something measurable and something good. And I think that some of that comes from a place of privilege, being just a white dude who says, whatever pops into my head. I recognize that. But I think that it's really, really important that people start treating each other like actual humans. Having an opinion, having a perspective, having something that's unique is not a problem. And if that's the one thing we can convince B2B marketers to understand, I think we've done our jobs.

Lindsay: And we also, broadly speaking as B2B marketers, we're the brand ambassadors and it's on us to know and understand the brands we represent really, really well, and therefore make bets that are going to feel like they make sense for the brand, even if it's pushing the limits, even if it's toeing the line, that it still is a good representation of the brand. And that's part of the job that only you as a human, no AI can replace that. Get creative using our brains to say, within the context of this brand, what opportunities do I have to really get creative and do something different? And so it's not a one size fits all, and what Ian's going to talk about with specific shows, whether it's Page One or Bust or some of the really, really, really different things that you're doing are not a fit for everyone. But that is the golden nugget of saying, this is the brand. I know it so well and I know our audience so well, here's a fun thing that I think we could do and a bet that I think we should take.

Ian: So here's an example of a B2B series. This is Pipeline Visionaries with Qualified, and you can just see all the different five components here. It's persona driven, it's four CMOs and demand gen marketing leaders. They're serialized. We have episodes drop weekly, it's peer led insights. You can see we put their faces front and center. It's multichannel, multi format, we're publishing it on Linkedin a bunch of other places, Apple, Spotify, YouTube, on the website so you can consume wherever you want. And I would like to think it's entertaining, that it's very helpful from an educational perspective and we keep it pretty fun. A huge part of this is building people as media channels. We don't need to get way into the details here, but basically LinkedIn's algorithm reserves 80% of the traffic for actual people posting not brands. So if you're relying too heavily on your brand and not your hosts and the guests that are coming on your show, then it's not as good of a winning strategy. inaudible Yeah, exactly. Because you're not going to go as far. So if you can build people as media channels within your organization, your employees, or using industry influencers, which we've seen people work, it works really well. And then non- traditional. There's all sorts of things that you can do that's non- traditional B2B storytelling that nobody is doing. So for example, our fiction show Murder and HR hit number one in the fiction charts on Apple, has done eight hundred thousand downloads in three months. It's super popular. There's documentaries, there's examples of people being really successful with documentaries. Very common thing in B2B. Music, the company click ClickUp, they did a million streams in the first month when they released a music album. And comic books, there's not a lot of people really doing this, but visual storytelling is so important now with all the mediums that we pay attention to. So there's lots of areas here and there's no traffic on the extra mile. If it scares you to think about, Hey, I'm going to make a comic book for our company, chances are the super boring, stodgy brand that you're competing with, they're probably not going to want to do it either.

Lindsay: A hundred percent.

Ian: Okay, so where the heck does this fit in your go to market? Because this has got to all drive business value, it's not just making art, as they say.

Lindsay: That's right.

Ian: But art is fun. So what we've seen is that if you have a ACV between 50 and a 100K, then you should be making a B2B series because you can drive that sales led approach or a hybrid approach where you have enterprise accounts, you can get to ROI really effectively. If you have an ACV of a 100K or more, if you're in cybersecurity, million dollar deals, all that sort of stuff, or even much higher than that, then you really need to be doing it. And the reason why is those relationships matter so much more and co- creating with your prospects and customers is even more valuable. So if you're doing a ABM, you should be doing a B2B series.

Lindsay: I would say also, and I agree with this, but I think especially now as things are even tighter, budgets are tighter, buying behaviors and purchases are under even more scrutiny I would bet and I would guess, and I would wonder if that a ACV number is even lower.

Ian: Oh yeah.

Lindsay: If it's down to 25, 30,000 it should be, this is a really, really good fit because I always think it's a good fit, but I think especially now I bet that number's lower.

Ryan: Well, I mean DemandJump if we're talking about our show and our stuff, our ACV is hovering around like 15 right now, 15K, and that's big compared to some of the other players in our space but small compared to what you're talking about and yet without the thought leadership that we're doing, I don't think we'd have the success that we have. It's just not possible. So I would add to this list, we are literally creating at least a subcategory. We're telling people throw out the things that you've been doing, you need to think about this completely differently. You can't do that in a sales deck.

Ian: Nope.

Ryan: And we know this and we track this. If someone shows up to one of our sales meetings and they've heard the podcast or they've seen me speak or they've read my book, we can skip 90% of the preamble and just jump right into the brass tacks. And without those things, it's all preamble. And so I don't know, there's no emotion, right? There's no connection. It's so important if you're trying to do anything that's a little bit different from what your competition is doing.

Lindsay: 100%.

Ian: You gave me goosebumps, Ryan, because that's exactly right. And that's like we just released our book, obviously Casted as Amplified Marketing. We all have our points of view on the world. And when you have a series and you have a point of view, you can layer those on top of each other and it works extremely well. You talk about anchor content, and it's like every single episode, you can say, " Hey, by the way, in my book, Pillar- Based Marketing..." Hey, by the way, chapter seven of my book, Pillar- Based Marketing..." You can refer back to this thing over and over and over again. And again, 13 impressions equals the sale, so the more times you bring that up, the more likely they are to be like, " Oh, hey, I am going to go check out this book. I'm going to check out this framework, and maybe we should use that at our company." And if they want to use your framework, then buying your software is a logical next step.

Lindsay: Absolutely. All right. Owned media, we've been talking a lot about owned media lately.

Ian: And definitely in quotes is this term is new and the sort of category around it is new. And I would just put this chart out there to say basically, if you're not making serialized stuff, you should be thinking of video, podcast, shorts and live slash events. That's how you should be thinking about it. Stop doing one- off blog posts unless you're doing pillar- based marketing type stuff and that's why we put SEO content at a different point in there. Spend a little bit less time on your webinars, which I know we all love our webinars, but a little bit less time, focus a little bit more on guides and tools. And I think that this blend is much more modern and relationship driven and outcome driven than the old way of just writing tons of stuff that nobody really caress about.

Lindsay: Human- centric, fully integrated audio and video- driven marketing, right?

Ian: Yeah, exactly. So this concept of brand gen, the cool thing about an event series, why we all love events, is because it's brand gen. You can literally say how much pipe is in the room and how much did we close from that event? And also a bunch of people saw our logo and all that sort of stuff. That's why we like it. Well, B2B series are the exact same thing, and no one has really ever talked about this, but there's this brand gen component to it that works really well.

Lindsay: Yeah.

Ian: Okay, so goals. So these are the nine things that we see come up over and over and over again with our customers. So these nine goals, and basically everyone is like, yeah, it's all nine of these. But to Ryan's point, category, pillar- based marketing, that's a core component to the goal of their series is to have pillar- based marketing be something that the community is talking about. You can do a ABM of course, brand pipeline, having just social content, telling customer stories in a new way, building your community or building a subset of your community and thought leadership for your executive team. Let's say you have one of your executives as the host of the show like Ryan is, he's getting his thought leadership out there in a way that is consistent and repeatable. He basically said earlier that he doesn't even think about it. That's what you want for your executive team.

Lindsay: This is the magic moment. How do we drive pipeline? How do all the marketers that are here and that are watching this forever and always on demand, this is the question. How do I drive pipeline?

Ian: So we use these six plays to drive pipeline and to show this stuff. So there's basically two ways to look at this. There's the actual guest pipeline and then those key accounts, and then there's the listener base. So there's sort of like a brand pipeline metric and a very targeted metric of the actual guest. So what's cool is using a tool like a Casted, the accounts that are actually engaging with your show. So you can say, okay, how many brand touches have we gotten, especially integrated into your CRM, you can do multi- touch attribution, stuff like that. It's really great. And then from the actual actual episodes, you can say, " Hey, these are a hundred of the target accounts that we're going after, our most important accounts over the course of the next year. We have 24 episodes we're going to do in the next year. How are we going to engage these people?" And let's say 80 of them are cold, so we have to reach out to them and get them on the show. 20 of them are in pipeline, so we want to accelerate those. Well, I already said 80 of them. So let's say 10 of them said, " Yeah, yeah, we're just not ready to buy."

Ryan: It doesn't matter. We don't care. We're marketers. We're creatives. Forget it.

Ian: Well, it'll add up to more than a hundred percent.

Lindsay: 165%.

Ryan: That's fine. That doesn't matter. It's not real.

Ian: And then another one is using partner marketing where it's like, " Hey, this stuff gets kind of expensive. We're going to go find a partner and we're co- create a content together." And there's a lot of enterprise companies that do that. This customer story piece where a lot of customers are not ready to give you a testimonial, but if you invite them on your podcast, they're like, "Yeah, of course we'll come on your podcast." And then you're like, " Hey, if you feel comfortable talking about the relationship that you have with us, feel free to bring it up. If not, no worries." And a lot of times-

Lindsay: inaudible two seasons on the Casted podcast where it was only customers and the whole thing was like, look, I'm not having you on to come say nice things about Casted. If we go that direction, I'm obviously not going to stop you, but I want to hear where podcast and video content plays a role in your strategy right now. And we have two whole seasons. And then we're able to cut that up and use it across different channels, especially little snippets of them inevitably saying lovely things about how we work together. So love that use case.

Ian: And then you can trade with other shows. You can say, okay, well, this is a super popular SEO podcast and you come on ours and we'll go on yours and et cetera, et cetera. So it just gives you this machine that you can run actual sales plays to drive pipeline, but you also get all of the benefits of the brand halo effect. All this stuff going out on LinkedIn, all the videos going out on LinkedIn, you can see who's listening to the actual show. And so all of this just leads to this brand gen engine, and you can just do an ROI calculation and get to these pipe in the room metrics, account engagement, all of that.

Lindsay: I love it. ROI.

Ian: What? From a podcast? Impossible. And so this is a calculation that we use to do ROI. So you have the brand pipeline source and influence, ABM pipeline source and influence, and then ROI calculation. We had one of our customers close an$ 800,000 deal that we sourced by getting one of their cold prospects onto the show. Three months later, they closed the deal. So this is real. It's not just pie in the sky stuff and it actually works. And the blend of these two approaches where you have the lurkers who are not ready to... Who are just listening to your stuff, and the very purposeful account- based approach. So again, it's blended and it's great.

Ryan: And something to call out here, because I talked about how I don't think about it, it's really important that we understand that you can't just put a podcast on the internet and expect this. I think that's the point of all of this, but we need to underscore it. What Ian said is important. They sourced a guest. That was a strategic decision, right?

Lindsay: Yes.

Ryan: They followed through. They created an experience for this guest that would not have happened otherwise, and it's definitely better than just getting on a Zoom call and having a regular meeting. Everything that went into that, it needed that sort of shared space of the show to happen, but then it needed a lot of work to create that space and then to follow up afterwards. So this is the same as anything else. If you just shout into an empty room, nothing is going to happen. But if you're this intentional, you shouldn't be surprised that it can.

Lindsay: Absolutely.

Ian: You can engineer success. And if you look at Page One or Bust, dude, it's an awesome show. inaudible Oh, that's right. Yeah. It's just an awesome show and it's been great working with y'all. But the part of the reason is, Ryan, you're super interesting. You have an interesting take on this stuff. You have this framework that you've built over time. You've lived it for so long, so you have the perfect host. You're bringing on interesting guests, you're having very engaging conversations about it and being able to drive business outcomes as well. I go in and look in Casted and look at the accounts that are listening to your show, and I'm like, this is crazy. It's cool that these people are engaging with it.

Ryan: And really, I mean, it's something that we can check on. We've got right now probably six or seven pretty big enterprise deals in the pipe, and those things take time. Our typical sales cycle is like 30 days. I mean, it's superfast because everyone needs what we do, and by the time we've proven the point that, hey, maybe you could have better results if you try something different. They just want to buy it quickly. But that's just not possible when you're talking about these large companies. And so being able to watch them engage over time and then...

Lindsay: Respond accordingly.

Ryan: Right. Everyone's been in that position where the sales salesperson is like, has it been too long? Has it been long enough? Should I be inaudible whatever. Any signals to help you with that are valuable. I would rather check and see someone still listening to my podcast than send one too many emails on a bad day. You know what I mean?

Ian: And there's reasons to talk to them, right? It's one of the things that we talk about a lot is if Ryan brings me on his show, there's a prep call, there's the actual recording, there's when it goes, Hey, you can listen to this ahead of time before it goes live. Just make sure everything's good, PR approves it, then you share it on social, then you re- share another clip a couple of weeks later. Then you reach out two months later and be like, Hey, by the way, you know that episode? You're already at eight hundred listeners or whatever. Those are all of the things where you have a reason to reach out to someone-

Lindsay: To build a relationship.

Ian: Yeah. And it's value added of like, Hey, this was awesome, and here's all this stuff. I mean, Salesforce built a playbook on putting people's faces on a hundred- foot things in downtown San Francisco during Dreamforce. This is our version of that. Put people's name in lights with a really high quality way to get them to share their insights so that they feel comfortable doing it. And it stands out. That stands out. It's a lot cooler than a lot of times the other stuff that they're doing on their day- to- day. Our show Remarkable, for example, the content marketers that come on it, they're like, " This is cool. I've never been able to talk about this stuff at work. I love Mad Men," or" I love this, and I never get to talk about it at work, so I got to talk about it for once." That's what you want is someone to be like, " Oh, I'm going to tell my spouse that I got to be on this thing."

Lindsay: Yeah, for sure. Absolutely.

Ian: And so this is how Caspian does it. So we have Pipeline Visionaries where I'm interviewing CMOs and demand gen leaders. We have our show Remarkable for content marketers, and then we use pillar- based marketing to create these pillars around all of the things that matter to our audience. And I worked with Ryan to build all this stuff, and we worked with DemandJump to figure this out, and we executed the strategy and it freaking worked awesome. And I think we've done two pillars so far. And then also we have Casted on our shows to figure out the accounts that are engaging. So again, I think this is just a really modern way of building where it's relationship, it's account engagement, you have passive listeners, and then you're very purposeful in creating SEO driven content of stuff that people are searching for. And that to me is the virtuous sort of circle.

Lindsay: This is the future.

Ryan: Right? Yeah. The more we can divorce marketing tactics from, I don't know, data collection, the better we're going to be. Because I talk about SEO on this podcast lot or in this webinar a lot because that's my world. But you look at, people are like, I've got to do my keyword research. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no. You're not doing keyword research. If you're doing it right you are learning about what matters to the market that you're trying to serve. And that's why I said, well, let's develop a methodology around that that works. And the same thing is on display here, where it's like, the better you understand what people care about and the conversations that are already happening, the better you can enter those conversations, the better you can change hearts and minds, all of that.

Lindsay: Yeah. I mean somewhere along the way many have lost sight that this is people creating for people. That's it. And so we've gotten so wrapped up with tactics and keyword research and conversions and ROI and metrics and numbers that the pendulum has swung so far in the wrong direction, so far past where we're just being helpful that now I see it coming back with basically what you're calling this case study, this is it. Create for people, see how it's working and make it really easy to find.

Ian: Yeah. And then you know who those people are, right? And there's compelling stuff. But it's great when someone comes into a piece of content through pillar [ based marketing, comes to Casted's website, who's never been there before. And then they go and check out our content and they go download the serialized content framework ebook and they go subscribe to the newsletter and all this stuff. So again, if you're being helpful and you're creating helpful content, they will buy when they're ready and you can get more data and shape those accounts in other creative ways.

Ryan: Yeah. I just did a podcast, and I'm blanking on the name of it right now, and I don't even think the episode's live yet. But one of the things that we talked about that I wanted to really hammer home because it sort of blew the host's mind was that we treat every page as a conversion page potentially. There's still this talk of, these are money pages, these are not, and it's just like if you can create that network of content on your site and made of all these multimedia channels and everything, and just assume that any one piece someone finds their way into your environment in could be the thing that pushes them to finally reach out and make contact with you, it really changes the equation too.

Lindsay: That's right. Well, we have 30 seconds left, so I think that we'll leave it there. But thank you everyone. For anyone who joined us and has questions, you can reach out to us anytime. We would love to continue to geek out. But Ryan, Ian, thank you so much for being here. What a fun conversation.

Ryan: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Ian: All right.

Lindsay: Thanks everyone.

Ian: Thanks for all the questions and engagement and everything. We appreciate it.

Lindsay: All right. Enjoy the rest of your day, everybody.